Elements of Fiction Writing - Characters & Viewpoint

by Orson Scott Card

He is going through things that would make a normal person angry and afraid; but by downplaying his response to them, the narrator makes it amusing instead of infuriating.

Fiction doesn’t deal with what happened once. Fiction deals with what happens.

The most important tool that will help your audience believe in your characters is elaboration of motive.

Motive is at the story’s heart. It is the most potent form of causal connection. So every revision of motive is a revision of the story.

examinations of motive come at the expense of action.

Motive tells why he acts as he does; attitude is the way he reacts to outside events.

it was because I was giving her attitude that I came up with the conflict in the first place.

each bit of attitude you come up with will help you decide what your character will do next.

The most obvious technique — and the least effective and most overused — is the flashback.

If you feel a need to have a flashback on the first or second page of your story, either your story should begin with the events of the flashback or you should get us involved with some compelling present characters and events before flashing back.

flashbacks should be rare, they should be brief, and they should take place only after you have anchored the story in the present action.

If the memory is going to prompt a present decision, then the memory in turn must have been prompted by a recent event.

The shorter the memory, the less important it needs to be in order to justify stopping the story for it.

You can tell stories in which characters are who they are from beginning to end, working out their destinies along the same relentless lines.

You can tell stories about people who seem to change, but then reveal that this was their true nature all along.

Tell stories about people who want to change but can’t until they discover their own true nature;

the characters are not transformed, they are unmasked.

The cause of change in people might be the drives and hungers born in their genes.

The cause of change in people might be the way they’re treated by others.

third fictional theme dealing with human change is that we can change our own nature by an act of will.

always show both the causes and the results of the change.

the more important the character and the greater the change, the more time you will have to devote to explaining the transformation.

strangeness in the writing calls attention away from the events of the story.

Because past tense and first or third person are the conventional choices, they are invisible. The audience doesn’t notice them. Therefore they become a channel between the story and the audience. If the audience does notice the tense or “person,” it is a barrier.

Most great writers followed all but a few of the conventions of their time. Most wrote very clearly, in the common language of their time; their goal was to be understood.

Choose the simplest, clearest, least noticeable technique that will still accomplish what the story requires.

satire and comedy, because they require less emotional involvement, suffer least from the disruptions caused by presentational writing.

The more you rely on the narrator’s voice to carry the story instead of the events themselves, the better your writing has to be.

After reading the narrative paragraph, we still feel that nothing has yet happened. But at the end of the scene, we feel that something has happened.

Characters are made more real through scenes than through narrative.

Bill’s job was settling clown,

one of the best reasons to use first person — to let us live for a while in a strange or twisted world, to see the world as someone else sees it.

first person is distant in time, third person in space.

First-person narration must reveal the narrator’s character or it isn’t worth doing.

It’s a lot easier for readers to adapt to the viewpoint change if they have already met the new viewpoint character, and it’s even easier if the new viewpoint character is already very important in the story.

about the chefs motive for putting such a small amount of food on a plate.

The omniscient narrator can tell more story and reveal more character in less time than it takes the limited third-person narrator.

As the omniscient narrator slips in and out of different characters’ minds, he keeps the reader from fully engaging with any of the characters.

Think of the limited third-person narrator as a combination of the most important representational features of the omniscient and first-person narrators.

First-person and omniscient narrations are by nature more presentational than limited third-person — readers will notice the narrator more.

If you’re writing humor, however, first-person or omniscient narration can help you create comic distance.

first person usually feels less fictional, more factual.

if you know you can write dazzling prose but the story itself is often your weakness, the omniscient and the first person invite you to play with language even if it distracts a bit from the tale itself.

the more common past tense feels natural and invisible.

With deep penetration, the viewpoint character’s attitude colors everything that happens. Unlike first person, however, we’re getting the viewpoint character’s attitude at the time of the events, not his memory of that attitude or his attitude as he looks back on the event.

Deep penetration is intense, “hot” narration; no other narrative strategy keeps the reader so closely involved with the character and the story. But the viewpoint character’s attitude is so pervasive that it can become annoying or exhausting if carried too far, and the narrative isn’t terribly reliable, since the viewpoint character may be misunderstanding or misjudging everyone he meets and everything that happens.